Table of contents for January 2021 in Custom PC UK

At last, some action about a subject that’s simultaneously trivial and also very important. The Advertising Standards Authority has banned a series of misleading adverts for the games Homescapes and Gardenscapes. These ads first came to my attention when they started featuring bizarre gruesome artwork and comedic horror gameplay footage, in which you had to stop a dismemberment or other impending terrible death of a cute sheep, sometimes via ‘pull the pin’ gameplay. No Man’s Sky overpromised in its marketing to a degree that broke the Internet The ads were attention-grabbing, and they worked. Lots of people downloaded the games, and lots of people got rightly annoyed when they turned out to be bog-standard ‘match three’ games, not comedy horror pin-pulling puzzle games. It seems trivial, because these are free,…

Is my GPU obsolete? Following on from a recent letter you published, asking about the best time to buy PC parts, I thought I’d ask a question that’s been troubling me –what makes a PC part obsolete? This week I had a motherboard capacitor blow on a very serviceable rig with a Core i7-2600K and DDR3 RAM. As I can no longer easily buy an LGA1155 or DDR3 motherboard, I have some parts that are now obsolete. This is acceptable, as they’ve served me well for years. A more concerning obsolescence comes from a graphics card I bought brand new, having done a fair amount of research, just under a year ago. When the GeForce RTX 2060 Super was released, many of the reviews said it was now pointless buying…

AMD’s Infinity Fabric is still very much involved in die-to-die communications within Ryzen CPUs and, since it’s tied to memory speed, it seemingly makes sense to opt for the fastest possible memory. AMD has also shifted its Infinity Fabric ratio up a gear with Zen 3. A 1:1 ratio now requires memory speeds of 4000MHz, instead of 3733MHz or 3800MHz with Zen 2 CPUs, depending on the motherboard. However, any memory much faster than 3466MHz can be expensive. For example, a 4000MHz Corsair Vengeance RGB memory kit costs £150. By comparison, a 3466MHz version of the same kit can be bought for under £110. Is it worth paying the extra money? To find out, we’ve put three memory speeds to the test, using a pair of 8GB (16GB total) Corsair…

Corsair’s H100i Elite Capellix introduces the company’s bright, vivid Capellix RGB LEDs into a CPU cooler for the first time, as well as tweaking performance compared to previous models. The pump speed has been increased by 200rpm at its peak, and the fan profile curves have been altered, providing a little extra oomph at the various presets. The fans still top out at a monstrous 2,400rpm, though, which will allow it to deal with more heat than the likes of the Antec Neptune 240, which can only reach 1,600rpm with its 120mm fans. The ML120 RGB fans included with the H100i Elite Capellix are available separately, but not with the same lofty speed rating. However, the fans retail at nearly £90 for a triple pack, which does help this cooler…

How we test As PCI-E 4 motherboards become more commonplace, and with Nvidia’s RTX IO tech allowing a graphics card to bypass the CPU and load game data directly from an SSD into VRAM, the value of upgrading to a PCI-E 4 SSD is becoming more tangible. However, they’re still a premium and relatively rare option. We’ve used an AMD Ryzen 5 3600XT, along with an MSI MEG X570 Unify motherboard, to test the PCI-E 4 SSDs this month, although all signs point to Intel’s current Z490 motherboards being able to support these SSDs with its future Rocket Lake CPUs too. For now, though, you’ll need a motherboard with either AMD’s X570 or B550 chipset. We’ve put each SSD through its paces in both CrystalDiskMark and AS-SSD to assess sequential…

With so few PCI-E 4 SSDs on the market at the moment, and even fewer controllers to differentiate them, the Sabrent Rocket NVMe 4.0 has its work cut out if it wants to differentiate itself from the Corsair Force MP600 and Gigabyte Aorus NVMe Gen4 SSD. All three of these drives are based on the same Phison PS5016-E16 controller, as well as Kioxia TLC NAND memory. What’s more, all three of these competing drives sport the same capacity options, with our sample offering 1TB of total storage space, with a formatted capacity of 931GB – the rest of the storage space is used for overprovisioning. The Sabrent also offers the same 1,800TBW endurance rating and five year warranty as the Corsair and Gigabyte drives. At first glance, the Sabrent Rocket…

The Keychron K2 has the notable accolade of being the most funded keyboard on Kickstarter, raising over a million US dollars for its wireless, Mac-ready spin on the mechanical keyboard. Sporting a compact, frame-filling TKL layout and retro-chic design, you can certainly see why it attracted attention. Starting with that design, you can clearly see the Keychron’s retro influences. It may not be the most original aesthetic but we have to confess that we think it looks great to our tastes. It certainly helps that Keychron has gone for a compact layout, where the keys entirely fill the base of the board, as you’ll often see with 60 per cent boards such as the Royal Kludge RK61 (see p61). There’s no sign of the unbalanced-looking open spaces you’ll see on…

Razer’s new flagship keyboard adds a HyperSpeed wireless connection to its updated BlackWidow keyboard design, for a typing and gaming experience that should be world-beating. Unlike the Logitech G915, it’s a full-height chunky keyboard and there isn’t a TKL variant, at least  for the moment Once again, Razer has waltzed away with the prize for the best-looking product in its class. It’s not just the choice of an all-black livery, the smart font or the metal top to the keyboard’s chassis. It’s not even the simple fact that Razer has a funky-looking logo that, unlike so many other logos, often adds to the design rather than diminishing it. It’s all these factors combined, along with a general sense of proportion and just the right finishing touch. Build quality feels good…

DEVELOPER Croteam / PUBLISHER Devolver Digital SERIOUS SAM + Fantastic combat + More diverse environments + More weapons and gadgets CASUAL CARL - Slapdash presentation - Overlong Serious Sam 4 makes itself difficult to dislike. When you’re mowing down Kleer skeletons with twin assault rifles after blowing up Vesuvius, while on a mission to find the Holy Grail, it feels churlish to note that the engine is the same one used to run Serious Sam 3 nine years ago, or that the character animations are stiffer than a drill sergeant’s underpants, and that the whole experience feels a bit sloppy and lacking in finesse. Despite appearances, though, quite has a lot has changed in Serious Sam 4. The game switches out the familiar deserts and temples of Egypt for the…

Ever since the death of the analogue CRT and the introduction of digital displays, there’s always been the potential to drive a digital display at its nonnative resolution. Because a digital display’s pixel grid is fixed and can’t change depending on the input signal, unlike the more analogue system of phosphors excited on a CRT by its electron gun, it’s always showing you those fixed pixels no matter what. On a modern digital display, it’s common to just always render at the same resolution as your display, be that your operating system’s desktop environment or a game, which takes away any question about scaling. Easy. Any inability for your system to do that will always add scaling to the display back into the equation, and there are two broad underlying…

At the moment of its inception, the Raspberry Pi single-board computer was designed for education. Sure, the initial batch – incorrectly predicted to maybe sell a couple of thousand units at the most – was built for hackers and hobbyists. However, the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s stated aim is to get low-cost hackable computing into the hands of as many students as possible. On its own, though, a Raspberry Pi single-board computer doesn’t do very much when you get it out of the box. You need a monitor and a keyboard for it at the very least, and a mouse wouldn’t go amiss either. SunFounder sees this lack of a screen and input devices as a drawback, and in February 2018, launched a crowdfunding campaign for its answer: RasPad. It was…

Not all cases like the GeForce RTX 3080 Founders Edition Nvidia’s new RTX 3080 GPU is undoubtedly an amazing piece of gaming silicon. It’s much faster than the RTX 2080 Ti and getting on for twice as quick as the RTX 2080 in many games, making it exactly what enthusiasts wanted in terms of an upgrade, especially as it costs the same price as the RTX 2080 a year ago. It can handle most games at 4K at maximum settings, and the Founders Edition looks pretty snazzy too. There are some issues with the Founders Edition flavour of the RTX 3080, though, and they can impact a  range of systems, especially smaller ones. The first issue is the flow-through design of one of its cooling fans. It’s designed to blast…

Released at around the same time as the 286, the 80186 was fully software-compatible with the 8086, with an emphasis on increased performance at the lowest possible cost. It was an instant success, and Intel produced 30 times as many 80186s as 8086s in the new processor’s first year of release. Although Intel at one point envisioned the 186 being used in workstations, word processors and PCs, it was the 286 that ultimately came to dominate the desktop market. Unlike the 286, the 186 had its clock generator, timer and interrupt controller – previously motherboard components – built into the CPU. However, these integrated components weren’t compatible with the hardware used in the IBM PC, leading IBM to select the 286 for its PC/AT range of computers. The 186 was…

INTEL LAUNCHES 10-CORE CPU FOR £440 In a bid to nab some of AMD’s limelight with the Zen 3 launch, Intel has released a new 10-core LGA1200 CPU at a cheaper price than the Core i9-10900K. The new Core i7-10850K offers ten Hyper-Threaded cores, and has a turbo boost frequency of up to 5.2GHz, with Turbo Max 3 peaking at 5.1GHz and a base clock of 3.6GHz. In terms of specs, that means the base clock and turbo clock sit only 100MHz below that of the flagship Core i9-10900K, with a 200MHz on the Turbo Max 3 frequency, which currently costs £550 inc VAT from scan.co.uk, but the new Core i9-10850K only costs £440 inc VAT from the same retailer. As its ‘K’ suffix suggests, the new CPU also has…

While Intel has offered better 8-core options for gaming than AMD over the past couple of years, the Ryzen 7 5800X is now looking to massively boost performance over its predecessors, especially when it comes to games. With the Ryzen 7 5800X, we could be looking at a CPU that not only makes Intel’s 8-core CPUs look redundant, but its 10-core Core i9-10900K as well. Unlike most previous 8-core CPUs, the Ryzen 7 5800X doesn’t come with a cooler in the box. In fact, most Ryzen 5000-series CPUs don’t include a cooler, but if you’re spending £400 on a  CPU, we think it’s fair to say you’ll want a third-party cooler anyway. Under the hood, there are still eight cores and 16 threads, and the core CPU dies are built…

Not much has changed when it comes to overclocking Zen 3 CPUs compared with Zen 2 chips, and sadly it looks as though we’ll have to wait a little longer for new techniques, such as per-core overclocking, which was rumoured to land with Zen 3. For now, it’s all about pushing that manual all-core overclock as far as possible with safe voltages. You also need to weigh up whether this is worth it, or whether you might be better off running your CPU at stock speed or using AMD’s Auto Overclocking. This choice largely depends on your needs. Any manual overclock will prevent your CPU from hitting its peak boost speed on a single core (such as 4.8GHz on the Ryzen 9 5900X), and no cores will reach frequencies higher…

LG’s UltraGear 38GN950 is a 38in mammoth of a screen that not only offers a bump in screen size over your typical 34in ultrawide display, but an increase in resolution too. Instead of the 3,440 x 1,440 pixels typical of such screens, here you get 3,840 x 1,600. It has some serious gaming credentials too. Like the recently reviewed LG UltraGear 34GL850 (see Issue 206), it boasts a 160Hz maximum refresh rate when overclocked (144Hz default), marking an improvement over the 100Hz (120Hz when overclocked) previous-generation ultrawide IPS screens. Along with this, it has a claimed 1ms response time, although this is a bit of a far-fetched claim. Such a rapid response is only achieved in a handful of colour transitions (response times vary depending on which colour a pixel…

Chillblast has been producing custom-made PCs and laptops for years, and has often picked up Custom PC awards. However, the company has now turned its hand to producing a gaming mouse, in the shape of the Chillblast Aero RGB. This ultra-lightweight mouse weighs in at an impressively low 72g. To attain this lightness, the body is covered in hexagonal holes that, rather neatly, reveal a backlit Chillblast logo glowing inside. The perforations extend to the back edge of the left and right buttons, as well as the underside of the mouse, but aren’t present where your fingers make contact with the front of the buttons, nor the sides of the mouse. This makes for a more familiar feel than the perforated sides of a mouse such as the Finalmouse Ultralight,…

Leno pow no GeForce RTX 2080 Super Max-Q GPU balances 3,072 stream processors and 8GB of memory with modest base and boost speeds of 735MHz and 1080MHz. Meanwhile, its Core i7-10750H CPU has six Hyper-Threaded cores, and there’s 16GB of dual-channel DDR4 memory clocked to a rapid frequency of 3200MHz. Storage is handled by a 1TB Samsung PM981 NVMe SSD that delivers superb read and write speeds of 3,506MB/ sec and 3,015MB/sec, and you get Wi-Fi 6 and a Gigabit Ethernet connection too. Meanwhile, the exterior sports a curious blend of business-like subtlety and gaming touches. The body is made from gunmetal aluminium that looks like it could have come straight from a workstation – the speaker grilles and power button are subtle, and there are no extraneous angles. That’s…

With quite a long history of making SSDs, Corsair at least has some brand awareness when it comes to pitching its Force MP600 drive, which is otherwise identical to some of the other drives on test. The 1TB model we’ve reviewed here costs £172 inc VAT, which is within spitting distance of the other two SSDs based on a Phison E16 controller and TLC NAND this month. So as we’ve said in those reviews, your choice here really comes down to price, features and any other factor outside of performance, where the three will perform very similarly. The Force MP600 looks attractive and much more like it means business than the Sabrent SSD, and that large black heatsink helped to chill it to a peak temperature of 66°C too. This…

With the Samsung 980 Pro, we finally get on to an SSD with some different silicon under the hood, and it’s also much more expensive than other SSDs on test this month. That’s mainly because Samsung is boasting some serious performance figures for the 980 Pro, with a claimed 7,000MB/sec read speed. If this stands up to testing, it would be 2,000MB/sec faster than the competition, basically enabling you to dish out an additional 2GB/sec when transferring files from the SSD over a PCI-E 4 interface. Unlike most other PCI-E 4 SSDs that use the Phison E16 controller, the 980 Pro uses Samsung’s own Elpis controller, along with 3D TLC NAND memory. Our 1TB model also has a 114GB single-level cell (SLC) cache. This means that if the drive filled…

Logitech G613’s is an odd beast. While the company’s newest wireless effort, the G915 (see p59), leans fully into the idea of slimness and portability that you might expect from a wireless device, the G613 is comparatively very chunky. The main culprit is the non-removable plastic wrist rest that’s integrated into the whole build of the keyboard. Add the fact that the G613 has a full-sized keyboard design, including a numpad and even a column of extra gaming keys down the left edge, and you end up with a huge footprint. The keyboard’s heavy too, weighing in at 1.46kg, and it uses full-height keys as well. The end result is a keyboard that you won’t want to be moving around, although the incorporated wrist rest does actually make typing on your…

SUPPLIER amazon.co.uk With possibly the strangest company name we’ve ever encountered, the RK61 by Royal Kludge appears every bit the cheap knockoff to be avoided like the plague. However, with thousands of units sold, plenty of positive reviews and a list price of just £50, Royal Kludge’s design is clearly onto a winner. Sure enough, design is one area this keyboard gets very right. Accepting the fact that white keyboards will end up looking obviously grotty once used for a while, fresh out of the box, the all-white look with light blue backlighting is really swish. There’s also a black variant with orange backlighting and RGB variants. It certainly helps that the RK61 sports a 60 per cent layout, which is where you not only lose the numpad, but also…

Core component bundles The fundamental specifications we recommend for various types of PC. Just add your preferred case and power supply, and double-check there’s room in your case for your chosen components, especially the GPU cooler and graphics card. We’ve largely stopped reviewing power supplies, as the 80 Plus certification scheme has now effectively eliminated unstable PSUs. Instead, we’ve recommended the wattage and minimum 80 Plus certification you should consider for each component bundle. You can then choose whether you want a PSU with modular or captive cables. Budget system with integrated graphics Quad-core CPU, basic gaming Needs a micro-ATX or ATX case. We recommend a 350W 80 Plus power supply. Budget gaming system Quad-core CPU, 1080p gaming Needs a micro-ATX or ATX case. We recommend a 450W 80 Plus…

DEVELOPER Paradox Interactive / PUBLISHER Paradox Interactive KING KONG + Brilliant dynamic storytelling + More refined and accessible than CK II + Great new military  and intrigue systems KING RALPH - Still a steep learning curve Although Crusader Kings III has the appearance and general mechanics of a typical grand strategy, in play it’s more a blend of Game of Thrones and The Sims. It isn’t simply about trying to conquer territory and govern your kingdom. It’s about trying to do both those jobs while your maniac brother is plotting to murder you, while your hot-tempered heir is determined to get himself killed in battle, and your nymphomaniac queen is squeezing out bastards like a human Pez dispenser. It’s an enormous, entirely dynamic human soap opera, and it’s utterly brilliant. It…

REVIEW STAR WARS: SQUADRONS / £30.99 inc VAT DEVELOPER EA Motive / PUBLISHER EA Not only is Star Wars: Squadrons the best Star Wars game in over a decade, but it’s also one of the most thrilling VR experiences currently available. If you’ve ever wanted to physically sit in the cockpit of an X-Wing, or get up close and personal with a Star Destroyer, then Star Wars: Squadrons is the closest you’re going to get without some serious innovations in space travel. Squadrons isn’t a VR exclusive game. Instead, it’s a standard experience with VR support. Moreover, it’s an excellent game with or without a VR headset, although we’d find it hard to go back to playing it on a conventional monitor after experiencing it in VR. Specifically, Squadrons is…

The launch of the Arduino platform is generally credited with making hobbyist-friendly embedded programming a thing, in no small part thanks to its Processing-based Wiring library, which sits over the top of the C/C++ programming language and makes it easier to handle the microcontroller and its peripherals. Today, though, C and its variants aren’t the most popular languages for learners – Python has long since supplanted them, offering a system that sits between the classic Beginners’ All Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code (BASIC) of the 1980s’ finest home computers and lower-level languages, yet is used in professional environments too, offering a route to a career – that’s not the case with BASIC. Seeing a need to combine the world of Python and Arduino, physicist and software developer Damien George took to…

Sutajio Kosagi, best known for the open-hardware Novena laptop and all-in-one desktop design (reviewed in Issue 146), is preparing to launch a crowdfunding campaign for a handheld RISC-V development device, called Precursor. ‘Precursor was built for everyday use but compromises nothing as a development platform,’ the company claims. ‘Powered by an FPGA-hosted, soft-core System-on-Chip (SoC), it gives developers the freedom to customize nearly every aspect of the platform.’ The handheld includes a physical keyboard, key security functions and a 100MHz VexRISC-V core running on an XC7S50-1L FPGA. More information on the device is available online at crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/ precursor…

We’re now so used to tiny transistors that the 7nm process used to fabricate AMD’s latest Zen 3 CPUs hardly seems worth mentioning now – it’s hard to keep track of the numbers of transistors when they get into billions. However, you only have to look at early PC CPUs to see just how far silicon manufacturing has come. Intel’s 80286 processor was released in 1982, and fabricated on a 1.5µ (1,500nm) manufacturing process, compared to the 3µ (3,000nm) process used by its predecessor, the 8086. It packed in 134,000 transistors: 4.6 times as many as the 8086. By comparison, AMD’s 7nm Zen 2 processors contain up to 9.8 billion transistors. The 80286 was introduced with an entry-level-model clock speed of just 6MHz. This figure would go as high as…

In a shift from its usual summer cadence of CPU launches, AMD announced its latest Zen 3 CPUs in October, with in-store availability right now. AMD claimed – and let’s not understate this – a massive 19 per cent gain in IPC, and therefore single-core performance leadership. AMD hasn’t been able to make this claim since it introduced the Athlon 64 17 years ago. It’s a true milestone. Make no mistake, AMD is ahead, so it’s no longer the ‘value’ brand you knew  beforehand AMD originally piled as many cores as possible into the first Ryzen chips to outmanoeuvre Intel, but we’re not getting more cores with Zen 3 – the Ryzen 9 5950X maxes out at the same 16 cores as the 3950X. If you’re a long-term CPC reader, back…

NVIDIA CANS 20GB RTX 3080 AND 16GB RTX 3070 While Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3080 currently comes with 10GB of memory, the tech rumour mill has been buzzing with rumours about a 20GB version that was planned to counteract AMD’s forthcoming Big Navi GPUs at the end of the year, as well as a 16GB version of the RTX 3070 (which has 8GB as standard). However, tech site videocardz.com claims to have spoken to two independent sources, who say these plans have been cancelled. The site also says a planned card called the GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, which upped the number of CUDA cores in the RTX 3070 from 5,888 to 6,144, has also been cancelled. According to one of the site’s sources, a reason for the 20GB RTX 3080’s cancellation…

In the early 2000s, we were revelling in the competition between Intel’s Pentium 4 and AMD Athlon 64, which saw great leaps in performance and CPUs from the underdog that genuinely outperformed Intel’s equivalents at nearly every turn. So far, Ryzen hasn’t quite lived up to the same prowess. Gaming performance has been lacking in many titles that showed hints of being CPUbound, making Intel CPUs better choices for pure gaming systems. Today, though, the Zen 3 architecture sees AMD catching up with Intel in most games, and the Ryzen 9 5900X is an absolute monster in  content creation too. Before we get to the numbers, though, let’s talk about specifications. At first glance, not much appears to have changed with AMD’s new 12-core, 24-thread CPU compared with the Ryzen…

Nvidia’s Ampere launch has gone about as smoothly as navigating a penny farthing through a quarry while wearing stilts. The RTX 3080 blew us away with its barnstorming benchmark results in Issue 207, but buying one now either involves optimistically adding your name to a pre-order waiting list, or handing thousands of pounds to a scalper on eBay. Stocks of both the RTX 3080 and the RTX 3090 are currently sold out everywhere. As such, the price of £1,399 at the top of this review feels a bit like a token gesture. Our current advice is to just be patient, wait for the ridiculous stock situation to blow over and pick up a card at a normal price next year. We’re also well aware of reports about third-party Ampere cards crashing…

Acer’s Nitro VG271UP is a 2,560 x 1,440 IPS panel with a 144Hz refresh rate, along with FreeSync and Nvidia G-Sync compatibility, plus a 1ms response time. The resolution is high enough to make games look crisp without taxing mid-range GPUs, and the IPS technology should deliver solid image quality. Acer’s panel looks the part. The base uses slim, angular struts with blue accents and the stand is finished in the same metallic shade. It has slim bezels too, so this display can be easily used in a multi-monitor setup. Meanwhile, the on-screen display (OSD) menu system is easy to navigate, and the joystick and trio of buttons at the rear are sturdy and well signposted. There are no USB ports, though, and you don’t get a headphone holder or…

The K100 is Corsair’s new flagship keyboard, so it has a huge price alongside a truckload of features. The most exciting addition can be found beneath the double-shot PBT keycaps – Corsair’s first optomechanical switches. The Corsair OPX switches balance mechanical-style keys with laser actuation. The OPX keys have a 45g actuation force, a 1mm actuation point and 3.2mm of travel alongside n-key rollover and anti-ghosting. The keys are lightning-fast and extremely sensitive – they hardly need to be pushed for a keypress to register, and the button movement is light, linear and shallow. Their sensitivity impresses, but they’re not for everyone, particularly if you want tactile feedback, but there’s another option, as the K100 is also available with Cherry MX Speed Silver switches that have a 1.2mm actuation point.…

If you like your M.2 SSD to have some heft to it, then the Gigabyte Aorus NVMe Gen4 SSD is for you. The massive slab of copper strapped to the PCB means you’ll definitely want to make sure it’s well secured to your motherboard, but you’ll also need your system’s colour scheme to accept it, as it has a habit of sticking out. Like the other two M.2 PCI-E 4 SSDs based on Phison controllers on test this month, the Aorus NVMe Gen4 SSD retails for around £170 inc VAT. That means there are just a few pounds separating it from the prices of the Sabrent Rocket NVMe 4.0 and Corsair’s Force MP600. Like the Corsair Force MP600, the Gigabyte’s heatsink is removable, should you wish to use your motherboard’s…

How we test Mechanical keyboards are still considered the ultimate typing and gaming tool by many, but by and large they don’t offer the freedom of movement and lack of desk-cluttering cables of a wireless connection. However, a handful of new models are starting to offer the best of both worlds. There were a couple of key factors to test with these wireless models. The first is to ensure that the wireless signal is sufficiently quick and reliable so as to not interrupt gaming or slow down typing. We tested alongside a wireless mouse (Logitech G Pro wireless) and wireless headset (Roccat ELO 7.1 Air) to provide as much of a challenge as possible. And, to cut a potentially long story short, we found that none of the keyboards on…

Sitting firmly in the ‘reassuringly expensive’ category, the G915 is a very pricey keyboard, with the full-sized version costing a whopping £210 and this compact tenkeyless (TKL) version without a numpad still setting you back £200. Wireless mechanical keyboards do tend to be pricey – as the even more expensive Razer BlackWidow V3 Pro shows – but it’s a whopping fee for a TKL model. It’s good, then, that the G915 largely looks and feels the part. Its top is wrapped in a fetching and firm sheet of brushed aluminium, which is shown off particularly well in the silver and white version, although it still looks very attractive on the black version too. It’s sturdy as well, despite the main body of this low-profile keyboard measuring just 9mm thick. It’s…

The launch of Nvidia’s RTX 3000-series GPUs has been met with huge excitement among PC enthusiasts, but many people have still yet to be convinced by the benefits of real-time ray tracing for the money – the top five GPUs in the current Steam hardware survey all have no ray-tracing features, for example. This isn’t a fault of the technology itself – the ability to fully simulate real-time lighting, shadows and reflections is genuinely astonishing. The issue, for me at least, is more to do with how ray tracing has been marketed, and how it’s used in many of the games that feature it. Since the launch of the RTX 2000-series, ray tracing has been touted as another major step forwards in the push towards graphical realism. Finally, players will…

DEVELOPER Hangar 13/ PUBLISHER 2K Games BADABING + Superb visual makeover + Improved driving and gunfights + More authentic script BADABOOM - Combat still fairly basic - Some iffy changes to characterisation Mafia: Definitive Edition goes further than most video game remakes. Not only does it completely rebuild the game in a new engine, but it also rewrites the script and recasts the actors for the main roles. Players assume the role of Tommy, a taxi driver by in the fictional US city of Lost Heaven. Struggling to get by in the Great Depression, a chance encounter with two local mobsters sees Tommy fall in with the local Salieri crime family. Tommy’s star rises quickly while his moral centre collapses, and he soon goes from collecting protection money and beating…

Autodesk has placed new limits on non-paying users of its Fusion 360 CAD platform, including the removal of probing, tool orientation, multi-axis milling, public download and cloud rendering options. In a move designed to shift personal users to paying accounts, but that may instead see them jump ship to free and open source alternatives such as freecadweb.org, the new limits also see users unable to export files from the platform in the vendor-neutral DWG format. More information can be found at autodesk.com/products/ fusion-360/personal…

Since the 8086, floating-point coprocessor chips – popularly known as maths coprocessors – had been made available as optional additions via a motherboard socket. They allow addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and square root calculations on numbers with decimal points to be carried out more quickly than on a standard integer unit, improving performance in arithmetic-intensive applications. Originally, that was mostly accounting and computer-aided design (CAD) software, but later games were also able to take advantage of the hardware, notably including 1989’s SimCity and flight sims such as Falcon 3 in 1991. The 486SX series was the last range of Intel CPUs to be released without a built-in maths coprocessor – its sibling 486DX integrated a floating point unit into the CPU.…

When we first launched Custom PC, our willingness to embrace overclocking made us stand out. Pages and pages were dedicated to detailing how to achieve the best overclocks, while behind the scenes we encouraged PC manufacturers to produce pre-overclocked PCs with a warranty. Over the following 17 years,overclocking evolved many times. It transformed from a dark art of DIP switches and socket mods with pieces of wire to a tweak that could be easily achieved with a few mouse clicks in the EFI or Windows. For a while, it even looked like it could become a sport in its own right, with competitors flying around the globe to take part in competitions and winning huge sponsorship deals. We now sell close to four times as many nonoverclocked PCs Now it…